This past weekend, I went to San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) — and while it was my first time attending a convention that isn’t specifically for LGBTQ+ people, I left with plenty of great news to celebrate. SDCC is the biggest, most important pop culture convention in the country, and LGBTQ+ people are making some of the best genre shows, movies, books, and more. Nerd culture is continuing to become more mainstream, and as this year’s SDCC proved, so is LGBTQ+ culture. Here is some of the biggest LGBTQ+ news out of San Diego Comic Con 2018.

For the past couple of seasons, Supergirl has featured openly lesbian Department of Extranormal Operations agent and Supergirl’s sister, Alex Danvers, and the show is adding to their queer cast with the announcement that trans actor and activist Nicole Maines. Maines will join the next season as Nia Nal, who will be television’s first trans superhero. You might recognize Maines from her acting on Royal Pains, or from her activist work where she filed a lawsuit against her school district for not letting her use the girl’s bathroom. This is a huge step forward for trans representation on TV and for inclusive geeky media. Supergirl returns to The CW on October 14.

Shortly after Steven Universe premiered an episode featuring the first lesbian wedding ever shown in children’s animation, and on the heels of show creator Rebecca Sugar coming out as a nonbinary woman, the Steven Universe crew came to Comic Con with an even bigger announcement: They’re making a Steven Universe movie!

They haven’t revealed much information about the movie, but they did debut a 15-second teaser that shows the Crystal Gems inside a spinning heart-shaped gem, followed by a silhouetted character who laughs ominously. We can’t wait for more. This show continues to push boundaries and experiment with just how much a children’s cartoon can do.

At Comic Con, Hall H is where most of the biggest shows and movies host their panels. This year, regulars like The Walking Dead, DC and Marvel movies, and the Transformers franchise were joined by Sundance favorite Assassination Nation, starring, among others, actresses Hari Nef and Bella Thorne. Assassination Nation follows the small town of Salem’s descent into chaos after a huge hack makes everyone’s secrets public. It looks like an incredible mashup of The Purge and the Emma Roberts movie Nerve. Nef commented that she thinks “it’s about being a girl in 2018 and not dying while doing that. It’s a lot harder than you would think, actually.” Assassination Nation also stars Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Abra, Bill Skarsgard and Joel McHale, and hits theaters September 21.

The Eisners, which are given out at San Diego Comic Con every year, are considered to be the Oscars of the comic book world. This year, women and nonbinary people took over. Out writer Roxane Gay won the Eisner for Best Limited Series along with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Alitha E. Martinez for Black Panther: World of Wakanda, which featured lesbian couple Ayo and Aneka. Queer creator Katie O’Neill won two awards: Best Publication for Kids and Best Webcomic for her delightfully cute The Tea Dragon Society. Emil Ferris also won two awards (Best Writer/Artist and Best Coloring) for her striking debut, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.

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The big winner of the night was Monstress, a lush and vibrant Asian-based fantasy/horror comic which took home Best Continuing Series, Best Publication for Teens, Best Writer for author Marjorie Liu (the first woman to ever win the Best Writer Award), and both Best Painter/Multimedia Artist and Best Cover Artist for Sana Takeda. My Brother’s Husband by Gengoroh Tagame and translated by Anne Ishii won Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia; Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless won for Best Graphic Album: Reprint; and Tillie Walden’s Spinning won for Best Reality-Based Work. For Best Anthology, the Taneka Stotts-edited Elements: Fire, A Comic Anthology by Creators of Color won, crowning around 30 new Eisner winners of color, many of them queer and trans.

Fans of the Netflix animated series Voltron Legendary Defender have long been shipping characters, writing fanfic, and creating theories about which characters on the show are queer. Their patience has paid off as the Voltron panel announced that they’d be introducing a new character in the upcoming seventh season: Adam, Shiro’s boyfriend. Shiro is one of the main characters on the show, and the leader of the Paladins, a special force of fighters who pilot the lion robots that make up Voltron. This is a major turning point for shows like that that have large LGBTQ+ fan bases, but usually no LGBTQ+ characters. By making Shiro queer and introducing his boyfriend on the show, Voltron is showing LGBTQ+ viewers that they matter, too. The penultimate season comes to Netflix on August 7.

After announcing that a Jewish lesbian Batwoman will be joining the Arrowverse and hopefully getting her own show, The CW also announced that the next season of Legends of Tomorrow will not only feature bisexual captain Sara Lance and her lover Ava Sharpe, but also bisexual occultist John Constantine, who will help the Legends face magic threats. Season four comes to The CW on October 22.

Wynonna Earp, which features queer girlfriends Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught, as well as gay science nerd Jeremy Chetri, announced that even though season three has just started, the show has already been renewed for a 10-episode fourth season. Wynonna Earp is one of the gayest genre shows on TV and it’s exciting to see it become more popular and successful.

This year’s Deadpool 2 featured the first out queer couple in a mainstream superhero movie with Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s girlfriend Yukio. But Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds doesn’t think that’s enough. At the Deadpool panel, Reynolds said that he wants movies to reflect real people and the real world. Even more, he hopes that his own character will explore the character’s canonical pansexuality, saying, “It's something that I'd love to see more of, certainly through Wade [Deadpool], certainly through this universe.” The director of the first Deadpool movie, Tim Miller has also said that the character is definitely bisexual. Seeing a visibly queer superhero star in one of the biggest superhero movie franchises would be a huge step forward in LGBTQ+ representation, especially for queer men.

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